Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Tuesday April 29, 2014 @03:07AM
from the pizza-is-a-balance-diet dept.

Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "Two prominent nutrition experts have put forth the theory that the current obesity epidemic is, in large part, the result of processed foods tricking our appetite control mechanisms. They argue that evolution has given humans a delicately balanced system that balances appetite with metabolic needs, and that processed foods trick that system by making foods high in fats and carbohydrates have the gustatory qualities of proteins. As the researchers put it, 'Many people eat far too much fat and carbohydrate in their attempt to consume enough protein.'"

Our diet contains more meat than any other point in history, even before factoring in the abundance of nuts and beans.While much fast or junk food is low in vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients, our protein intake is far from deficient.

Humans are anything but carefully balanced, besides. Living organisms are very adaptable and self-correcting - if they weren't, we'd all be long dead.

Our diet contains more meat than any other point in history, even before factoring in the abundance of nuts and beans.
While much fast or junk food is low in vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients, our protein intake is far from deficient.

While this may be true, it may also be irrelevant to the claims here. Contrary to popular belief, high protein foods (including meat, but also beans and legumes) are generally low in calories when they are lean. (And, in prehistoric, pre-agriculture diets, chances are any meat that was eaten would have been fairly lean, not have been off of a farm-fattened animal with "superior marbling" to attain a "prime" rating.)

However, from TFA:

Food manufacturers have a financial incentive to replace protein with cheaper forms of calories, and to manipulate the sensory qualities of foods to disguise their lower protein content. This leads to savoury-flavoured food that makes us think we're eating protein when in reality it is loaded with carbohydrates and fats.

So, say I eat a dish that "tastes like protein" and my taste receptors think that a savory dish that tastes like that should usually have a couple hundred calories.

But, instead, that dish is NOT protein at all, and is loaded with fats and processed carbs, which gives it a calorie content of over 1000 calories. I'm getting a signal from my body telling me it's okay to eat more (according to taste), even when I'm consuming way too many calories. Moreover, as we eat it, our body might be ready to digest the protein it assumes it there, but when it doesn't arrive, perhaps another impulse might kick in to continue eating to receive that expected protein?

Thus, it may not be a lack of protein overall, but a mismatch in our digestive system and hunger impulses getting confused when we intake food that our bodies think should contain protein, but doesn't.

Humans are anything but carefully balanced, besides. Living organisms are very adaptable and self-correcting - if they weren't, we'd all be long dead.

While this is certainly true, TFA seems to be about our bodies getting the wrong chemical signals from foods that don't (and probably can't) occur in natural raw plant and animal sources. If we've evolved while always consuming foods with certain characteristics, but now we're eating foods that have very different characteristics that confuse our systems, those "balancing" elements may not react correctly.

Again from TFA:

It is clear that the balance of nutrients -- especially protein, fat and carbohydrate -- has profound effects on many critical physiological functions, including appetite, energy intake, obesity, cardiometabolic health, ageing, immunity and the microbial ecology of the gut.

Processed carbs flood our bodies with sugars, whereas prehistoric carbs would have had less concentrated sugars and which would have required much longer digestion (and a HUGE intake to get anywhere near modern levels). If a human body is flooded with stuff that metabolizes in odd ways, perhaps it causes people to crave things that would regulate it and be digested more slowly (e.g., proteins)... which could drive us to eat "savory" things. But unfortunately, the "low fat" craze may then drive us to seek out "savory" by eating more carbs that have a "fake protein" taste, which again confuses our bodies, and the cycle continues.

Perhaps. I don't really know what's going on. But the argument from TFA is not impossible on its face.

Have you ever traveled to a Third World country with a group of Westerners? My experience is that your group will likely be a full head taller and noticeably more muscular than the the locals. Yes, our diet is better than people in the past had available to them, that doesn't make it wrong.

It also doesn't mean it can't be better. We're seeing metabolic diseases at younger ages; we're able to keep people alive longer but they're not healthy. Life expectancy is even starting to drop [bloomberg.com]; not dramatically, but there's reason to think we can do better.

Too little food is definitely bad, and leads to malnutrition. But we're getting people who are malnourished because they have too much food, and of the wrong kind. It's not that hard to do better, but people need to pay attention.

Plants are an important part of a healthy diet, but they tend to lack in the protein and fat intake we need. Yes, we need fat to live. You can live without carbs for many months, but if you don't eat any fat, you're dead within three months. Even vitamins usually can be abstained from for longer periods of time without you dying. Carbs mess up our blood sugar and are proven to be one of the main contributors to the amount of diabetes type 2 we have today, as well as the enormous amount of obese people ( htt [ds9a.nl]

Almost everything you said there is wrong. Broccoli has more protein per calorie than steak does [drfuhrman.com], and there are plenty of plants with tons of fat. In fact, healthier fats (mono and poly unsaturated) mostly all come from plants. Try some nuts or an avocado if you don't think you're getting enough fat. This is exceedingly unlikely though, since you don't really need much fat to get by. The recommended minimum is 15% of your calories, but it's not like you're going to die within three months if you don't eat any fat - this guy [bmj.com] didn't consume any calories at all, including fat, for 382 days with no ill-effects.

Your statements about carbs are a little difficult to deal with, "one of the main contributors" is a hard statement to disprove. Really, type 2 diabetes is (mostly) caused by obesity and certainly you can get fat by eating carbs. But you can get fat by eating too much of anything. It's how much you eat (calories), not how you eat it [googleusercontent.com], that determines how much weight you loose. Fad diets, like a low carb diet, do work, but they work by restricting your calories, not by some special voodoo.

That's it. Humans with exactly this strategy were most likely to survive the periods of hunger that were very much normal until a few decades ago.

Of course, this strategy fails completely if food is always available and hunger periods never occur. Constant availability of food is a relatively new phenomenon, too new for humans to have adapted to it.

Actually, humans have done a good job of surviving famine and other food stresses by adopting long term storage strategies. It's fundamental to agriculture -- usually your crop is not producing 365 days of the year. Humans unable to ration and protion themselves would be less likely to survive because food availability is rather variable. We're not just eating machines. And there are plenty of places historical and contemporary places with high food aviailability and no significant obesity problem. Comp

And there are plenty of places... with high food availability and no significant obesity problem. Compare America to Japan.

We get that comparison a lot. I am certainly not suggesting there isn't more to it than this, but maybe the average Nippon metabolism is higher than that of an American's.

There are people who can eat anything they want without gaining weight, and others who struggle on diets their entire lives.

Many survivors of the Irish potato famine emigrated to America with their slower than average metabolisms, lest we forget skinny folks who require greater caloric energy are not typically selected for in nature.

... food companies have scientists working 24/7 to hack human tastebuds for profit.

Much of this problem simply comes down to the fact that bad food is engineered to taste better than natural food we found in our environment over evolutionary history. The problem is our bodies aren't designed to deal with this new food environment and hence obesity. The environment that kids are raised in by clueless over stressed parents and shitty school environments doesn't help either.

Last but not least, human beings are not free. Probably one of the biggest myths that go along with the myth of responsibility.

I always loose weight when I am living in Japan, and it's because the amount of delicious "proper" food that is available at reasonable prices is incredible. Where in the UK you might find a single McShit or KFC, perhaps with a Starbucks if you are lucky, in Japan there is always a good selection of more traditional, healthy stuff.

There are more subtle differences too. Most restaurants give you free water, with a jug on the table so you can top up yourself or a very attentive waiter to do it. As such most p

The LCHF Paleo Primal Banting community, the people who have been reading Taubes' review of the literature going back pre-war, and so on, and who have tried this stuff for themselves, the basic insight is that it is the carbohydrates that are the problem.

The grain growers wanted to mass produce and sell the stuff, and some politicians liked a "heart healthy" message (despite scientists protesting that more research was needed before jumping to conclusions) and so the whole "heart healthy" movement was born, which emphasised high carb foods like cereals, by demonising fat.

Well after some decades, and people trying it for themselves, people are now realising that it was pretty much completely wrong. And manufacturers, because fatless food tastes of cardboard, knew they had to increase the sugar content to make up for the lack of taste. Low fat yoghurts loaded with sugar. Healthy smoothies, loaded with sugar.

The carbs create cravings, signal the body to store fat, and overwork your insulin production until it breaks.

But dietary fat? Good natural fats are good for you. They are good for the guts, the heart, and the brain. Well, you can read books and various docs on this, and try it for yourself. See if their claims seem to work out. It isn't a short term diet, it is a lifestyle.

From what I've read, high carb diets, specifically those high in sugar, suppress the leptin response, keeping you feeling hungry, eating more carbs that get turned to body fat instead of being consumed.

Reducing/eliminating carbs helps with the leptin response by causing you to not be hungry and less interested in food.

The grain growers wanted to mass produce and sell the stuff, and some politicians liked a "heart healthy" message (despite scientists protesting that more research was needed before jumping to conclusions) and so the whole "heart healthy" movement was born, which emphasised high carb foods like cereals, by demonising fat.

It would be better for the grain growers if you ate animals that were fed grain, as this process is less energy efficient. This is a lousy conspiracy theory.

The first point seems to be, fat is not bad, because that's a big part of the ordinary public message, "fat baaad! fat make you faaat! fat give u um chest pain!" and that's pretty much wrong, actually lots of fats protect the

This has been found out over and over again, but the food industry will always lobby against anything which would reduce their market. They even lobby against labels. In the EU, there was an initiative which wanted to color code the amount of fat, sugar, salt and other carbohydrates with (green = low, yellow = medium, and red = high) together with numerical values. It was stopped after massive lobbying. So now these labels are all white or black, require reading, and the values are distorted in different ways.

So this is an uphill battle. What helps, is buying at a local market instead of a supermarket. And do not watch TV adverts.

These labels are colour coded in the UK, with both a numerical value and a percentage of your Guideline Daily Amount (Or Recommended Daily Intake, whatever is the current popular phrase). I've no idea what the criteria are for the labels, though; I've seen some which just didn't make sense (5% of salt intake, red label? I'm not going to eat 20 bags of this a day!)

They show that the stuff you bought have, for example, a high salt concentration. Naturally, you would not eat so much of the stuff that it would be harmful. However, this might not be so clear for other product or for other people. Anyway, the label alerts you to the fact that this food has a high salt concentration.

BTW: Many people have a distorted relationship to food. They eat two bags of potato chips together with 2 liter of coke during a TV session. The idea is to inform them more drastically that the

That's basically the deal here: It's way cheaper to squeeze out kibble made of carbs and fat rather than creating something that contains protein. Protein can be found in animal based food (fish, meat, eggs, cheese) or a few vegetables (mainly certain nuts and pulse). And neither of them is easy or cheap to cultivate in large quantity.

It is, though, fairly cheap to produce fat, especially since we found out how to turn dirt cheap crap fat into shortening. And carbohydrates are a staple for pretty much any culture in existence anyway, and we managed to perfect its production.

Fat and carbs, carbs and fat. We excel at producing them and we can do it for cents per ton. Ain't that easy for protein. So processed food will contain as much fat and carbohydrates and as little protein as we can get away with.

But our bodies are not fooled that easily. They know what stuff should be in our diet, and if you don't eat what you're "supposed" to eat, you'll stay hungry. Now the vicious cycle starts because we're hungry, so we eat. The wrong crap again, so we stay hungry.

A solution is probably only possible if we simply forgo processed food and actually start cooking and eating sensibly again. But, and this is the next problem, can we still afford that? You, me, we probably can. We have money to "waste" on internet access, obviously. But how about people who're not as well off? Can they?

The problem is that we metabolize bread just as fast as sucrose. Even Coca Cola gives less of a 'sugar rush' than bread (because Coke contains fructose).

So, if you are big, fat and lazy, just stop eating wheat, potatoes and rice products and you'll be pleasantly surprised at the result. This is otherwise known as the Caveman diet, Paleo diet, Atkins diet, High Protein diet, or any number of other names. It works and there is no need to buy and read a book about it, though it won't hurt if you do.

I eat fast food regularly, I never eat whole wheat, I live at a desk. I'm 5'9", weight 145 pounds and can bench press 175, not great but acceptable. Maybe I have a better metabolism that most everyone else or I just eat when I need to and no more.

....used to be made with paper and tobacco leaf. That's it. That is how it was grown and manufactured for hundreds of years.

Today's cigarette contains hundreds of ingredients. And they sure as hell weren't added as flavor enhancers.

Anyone "tricked" over the concept of addictive chemicals being added to fast food that make you want to crave more of their product is rather ignorant of the world we live in, and the greed and corruption that built it.

Yes. If we have been tricked, it is that we think we need so much protein. Meat consumption in the rest of the world is a luxury, and if you look at the places that eat less meat, they have way less chronic metabolic diseases than we do. I'm not saying they have no disease, I'm saying they have less.

We have also been tricked into thinking that carbs are bad...when in fact, lots of places in the world eat carbs all their life and are still healthier than we are. The difference is that there carbs are way less processed.

We have been tricked into thinking that soy is good for us, when the way they eat soy in the rest of the world is way different than the highly processed soy crap that we eat here.

We have been tricked into thinking that milk is good for us, when in fact it is not (but may help if you have a really crappy diet).

Yes, we have been tricked, all right! If you want to live, take a world map and throw a dart at it. Anywhere it lands outside of the US, adopt their diet. You will live longer and healthier than we do here in the US.

....but it's clear to me, having been born in 1967, that the 'obesity epidemic' largely coincided with the obsession to eliminate fat from our lives.

In particular, for Americans who eat a significant amount of meals outside the home, when restaurants were compelled (I don't know if it had the force of law, or just lots of government pressure) to abandon animal fats in cooking in favor of the hydrogenated vegetable oils. That's where I really personally remember thinking "wow, was everyone really this fat b

The obesity problem is best understood not as the result of the overconsumption of a single macronutrient, but from a skewing of the proportion of each macronutrient in our diet - notably the dwindling quantity of protein in processed food products. The paucity of protein relative to fats and carbohydrates in processed foods drives the overconsumption of total energy as our bodies seek to maintain a target level of protein intake.

"Two years of Newtrition investment and research had produced CHOW(TM). CHOW(TM) contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colorings, and flavorings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two th

The modern processed food industry, OK the American processed food industry, works hard to make processed foods appetizing by tweaking formulations and experimenting with salt/sugar/fat ratios.

I think the book does a balanced job of presenting the info without blaming the industry (too much). They do make the point the food industry targets convenience and cost, which consumers respond to. It isn't all the food companies fault that their customer base is kinda lazy.

The food industry has tried a few times to make their stuff healthier by reducing additive amounts, trying new tech - one very interesting thing for example is trying to use a different salt crystal, one ground into a different shape that absorbs quicker. It gives the same "pop" with less, due to its different shape. That's pretty cool!

It's not about a conspiracy. The facts are in the open, and no one is actually hiding anything. Fat and carbohydrates are cheaper than proteins, thus processing them and adding flavors to trick the metabolic system into taking them as protein ersatz is just the old art of cooking. And we got better and better at it, able to produce and process giant amounts of fat and carbohydrates and refining them into meals that taste to us just as good as a protein rich diet.

The food industry didn't need to conspire for that. It was just that the food that was cheaper while still tasting nearly as good sold better than the high quality one, and with enough processing and flavoring, the cheaper food actually tasted even better. If you want success in the market, you have to offer the prices and the tastes only processed, flavored food can offer. Providers of high quality foods with low processing just got outcompeted. That's the invisible hand of the market, combined with thousands of years of cooking experience: selling shit for food.

Add to that the fact that basically you have the choice of buying raw food, processed food or paying someone to cook for you. Properly cooked food, starting with raw ingredients, without fail tastes better. The problem is either you have money and can dine out or you need the skill to cook. If you where raised, like me, on the concept of buying raw food and cooking it, you will have learnt how to actually cook. But as it turns a good few people's cooking skill stops with scrambled eggs and as a result they buy processed food.

Processed food in itself is not bad and you can buy quite good quality food, but that costs. Competition in the food industry means sacrificing quality for profit/lower price and they will continue to "optimize" until the product stops selling. The interesting bit is that in recent decades there is a gap between the sensory experience of the food and the actual nutritional quality.

Flour, sugar, stock, milk, butter, baking soda, baking powder, cheese,... require processing to make. While I agree that fresh foods taste better then the same out of a can it's complete and utter nonsense to think that only using raw ingredients will yield a better meal.

Cooking is more a test to your capability of organisation and laziness than having the time.Many meals are simple to cook, or then take your ipad or TV to the kitchen, and cook while you watch idols or Game of thrones. The problem with cooking real food is that many are lazy, and others the parents already didnt do that, and they dont really are not used to do it. The culture of buying everything already made is very pernicious when we are talking about what we eat.

You are correct. It literally takes 10 minutes to season a chicken breast and throw it on a grill while you steam some fresh broccoli and make a little pasta for a side. There you go, fresh and healthy dinner for less than $5/plate.

You also need to live somewhere with access to those ingredients, have a high enough income that you can afford the ingredients, and a high enough income that you can afford to be not-working long enough to cook and eat them. There are thousands upon thousands of people too poor for all three.

Yeah, umm, that problem is that if you're really poor, cooking for yourself is actually significantly cheaper. I lived for several years on a very small budget and had friends with even smaller food budgets (on the order of $20/week... yes, that's the entire food budget for the week for a person -- about $1/meal), and we not only survived, but ate rather healthy food that we cooked ourselves. Try living on a $1/meal by eating off the McDonald's Dollar Menu or something -- it's doubtful you could even get

all you need is a big pot or pan with fire, cheap gas burners are well.. cheap, or just burn some wood like the old says, are you a cave man? jeez, what poor are we talking about? average walmart workers, or refugees in african camps, which btw do cook.

So who are these noncookers ? Gen Z facebookers? Homeless ? If you are THAT poor, you are probably thin from starvation.

And how many of them have, *gasp*, refrigerators? Imagine some of these *poor* people having computers!!!!

That was sarcasm by the way.

See, the thing is, some might have, but many do not. I know I didn't for the first 15 years of my life in this country. Similarly, a lot of people live in rental communities that already come with a cable bundle that you cannot opt out.

Say "oh well, they could live somewhere cheaper?" Yeah, they can live in a trailer on in a dilapidated ghetto. Certain utilities that mi

This is not "Flamebait", but I think it is a naive view of poverty in the US. Do poor people make poor choices? Yes, naturally. Some make poor choices so often that it could even be the reason that they are poor.

So you can stand there and point at them and blame them for their condition. It's reasonable. You give them healthcare, you give them education (of some sort), you give them food, you give them money - and what do they do? They stay poor, make bad decisions, and raise poor kids who do the exact same

...is also a major culprit in this story, in part due to the "low-fat" orthodoxy that developed in the 1970s. When you take out the fat, you lose a lot of the flavor, so sugar was used to make processed foods more appealing. Even worse, hydrogenated vegetable oil was used as a fat replacement. (Turns out that saturated fats are not as bad as they thought back then.) Another problem with processed foods is that they contain far less fiber, since removing the fiber is an easy way to extend shelf life. But this affects the way they are digested and absorbed, exacerbating the bad side effects.

Dr. Robert Lustig has an excellent lecture [youtube.com] about sugar and how it is the single most important change in our diet in the last few decades, and the chief cause of rising obesity and diabetes rates. (The above link is a TED Talk, he also has several long format lectures available on YouTube.)

* What he means by this is "real" food, rather than the "edible food-like substances" that constitute the bulk of the American diet. He has a simple rule for identifying real food: If you've ever seen it advertised on TV, it's probably not real food. Also, for various reasons, there is an inverse relationship between the "realness" of food and the distance it travels from its source to your plate.

No way.I live in Uruguay, we grow some fruit here, but also import a lot. Local fruit usually looks like you picked it up from a tree.Imported fruit looks more uniform, and more colorful, and usually has some kind of wax to protect it. They also have small labels in each piece, some times.Also, local fruit smells like fruit, imported fruit has no smell, in comparison.

Of course, YMMV, but the closer you are to the source, it's easier to get fresher produce.

Completely bullshit. I am sorry, the pineapple I get from the store tastes NOTHING like the pineapple I had fresh picked an hour earlier when I was in Chile. The strawberries I pick fresh from a local farm taste heavenly, the ones I get from a supermarket are extremely bland. It's because they pick the stuff when it isn't ripe (they have to), and it ripens either in delivery or on the shelf of the grocery store. It loses a lot of flavour when it doesn't ripen naturally on a tree. When you go to the produce section and see all green bananas that take a day or two to ripen taste nothing like a banana picked fully ripe off a tree in Ecuador.

It's sedentary living. You will never get millions to eat so little that they avoid obesity while watching screens 16 hours a day.

And then again...

It's true that sitting still in front of a screen all day long means we burn less calories, just as it is true that we get fatter because we eat more than we need. There is a long chain of causes and effects, and perhaps there is no real, fundamental reason; but if we want to fix the problem, I think the best place to start is by removing the very powerful, economic incentive that certain industries have to produce a lifestyle in which everybody are passive consumers of light-weight entert

Ever cooked food before? Ever ground anything into a powder before doing something else to it before eating it? In either case, congratulations, it's processed. This also includes *any* kind of oil or milk alternative, which are very heavily processed extracts from different kinds of plants. *ANY* kind of soy that is actually edible is also heavily processed.

This whole article is bullshit. I first tried dieting by avoiding processed foods (namely, the kinds that tend to be higher in sodium, carbs, fats, etc

My father was a UK war baby who served in occupied Germany after the war. Lard (sheep's fat) was a common substitute for butter in Europe during WW2. He was raised in a rural village in the north of England but even as an adult living in Australia he would save the fat from the Sunday roast so he could "enjoy" cold lard and salt sandwiches for the rest of the week. His three children and wife all thought it tasted like axle grease, so he had it all to himself. He's 80 now and still going strong.

and they didn't die of malnutrion as a kid, like a staggering percentage of farm kids did before the evil food industry started putting additives in food

A lot of the pro-organic crowd doesn't seem to realize that the "evil megacorps" also provide what they buy as well, only they sell organic at a much higher profit margin. People who go out of their way to buy organic food are really quite uneducated and gullible, to be honest.

Actual non-diet industry research using tests with mice has shown it is heavily processed foods with about equal amounts of sugars and fats that cause issues. You can live quite easily and not get huge on high fat foods that are not processed. You can also live on a high sugar diet on foods that are not processed. Though either one is not a good long term choice. Our bodies are designed to eat certain amounts of both.

Tests on rats shows they will nearly OD on something like cheese cake and yet high sugar fo

Yes, the parent post is trolling, but it's the best kind of troll - the truth. Too many people want to blame others for their faults. If you want to lose weight, eat less, eat better, and get off your ass more often.

That can be good advice for individuals, but as health policy it's terrible. Humans are largely unable to resist their instincts for long by willpower alone - that's why abstinence-only education fails.

I said 'can be' good advice. Some people have the self-control for it to work. Many more do not. There's a tendency to shame those who lack control and assume it's a personal weakness, rather than admitting that it is just human nature.

How does that work? To lose weight from a diet, you need to consumne fewer calories than you use. To stay at the same weight once you've lost enough weight, you need to consume the same amount of calories that you use. These aren't the same thing.

An overweight person would need to make some change to his eating habits, but that change wouldn't consist of making the diet permanent--if he did, he'd just keep losing weight down to nothingness (or at least

The biggest scam that the weight loss industry has ever managed to perpetuate is to redefine the word "diet" from meaning "what you eat, on average" to meaning "a temporary restriction in your usual regime of eating whatever you want."

Fat folks have it tough in life, though. If you think about our ancestors as simple hunter and gatherers, who communally shared all the food they had . . . a fat person sticks out as someone in the group who is eating more than his fair share of the rest of the food. That would breed bad feelings in the group towards that person. Maybe that trait has been passed along to us

In general, people in the "civilized" countries eat far too much, period. While it's nice to blame food consistency for it, it's just lack of movement and overavailability of food that's totally suitable for explaining the balance between effort and intake

I'm sure that the point of this study isn't that simple. (If I could be bothered to read it, that is) Your point would be pretty obvious for a conclusion, it's probably the starting point that led to that study. Like: WHY are people in "civilized" countries overeating? And why is this happening even more with processed foods? Then that study finds with which bio-chemical stuff the food industry manages to trick our body to accept junk food as "valueable"

The experiment you mention is irrelevant. The TFA does not discuss how much protein is good for your health. You can surely reduce your protein intake and have no ill effects, as long as your caloric intake/outake are balanced.

The TFA simply says that our bodies are tuned to crave for protein. Overprocessed foods have been tweaked to contain less protein because protein is expensive to produce.

So, if your diet consists of overprocessed foods, you need to consume a disproportionately large amount of calories

The CDC recommends 56g of protein for adult males, and 46 for females. The British Nutrition Foundation's RNI is 0.75g per kilogram of body weight. Proteins in diet provide essential amino acids which cannot be synthesized by our organism. Most people get more than enough protein, but getting too little is very very bad [sfgate.com]. See also [wikipedia.org]. Now show us what you've been reading.

The CDC recommends 56g of protein for adult males, and 46 for females. The British Nutrition Foundation's RNI is 0.75g per kilogram of body weight.

The CDC is whey off, follow the British standard. Most people do not get enough protein, you know when you've eaten enough protein because your body stops craving food. Without protein intake you die fast, faster then simple calorie starvation, protein is one of the major reasons why your body triggers a hunger response. For a week try intaking 1g/kg of protein a day and you'll understand what I'm saying. The whole point of this article is that processed foods typically exchange protein for fat and carbohydrates, the problem with that is fat and carbohydrates are fuels; protein is a biological building block.

Plants produce fruit to be eaten, so that the eater will spread the seeds. The fruit wants to be eaten. That is its purpose. So eating an apple is ethically different than eating a carrot, which of course kills the carrot plant. People that eat only fruit are fruitarians [wikipedia.org].

You're being funny, but the fact of the matter is that there are websites out there (aimed at kids for fuck's sake) that literally say "dying is the best thing you can do for the planet Earth!" and I don't think they are being funny when they say it. Of course all the tree-hugging ecological extremists all spout crap about how bad us Humans are for the planet and how we should at least give up our technology and civilized ways and go back to nature, then they get in their Prius and drive home to blog about

I'm sure the leftists will have us proles all eating insects and vegetables eventually..at least until the aspca gets around to defending insect rights. Of course, the party elite will still be dining on the few cows and fish that are left..

Amusing. Trying to derail a thread about how capitalism is fucking up people's diets by blaming "leftists"?

The problem for vegetarians (and more especially for vegans) is not getting enough proteins, it's getting all of the required amino acids (for some reason, the term 'a whole protein' is used to mean 'all of the essential amino acids'). For future reference, by the way, you need around 25g of protein per day, but it has to be balanced among 9 amino acids that the human body can't synthesise (the other 11 can be synthesised from those 9). It's not particularly hard to get all of them - in fact, if you're meeting your calorific quota and not starving then you probably are. Unfortunately, a lot of hippy-vegan recipes that seem to be closely associated with vegetarianism have a terrible mix, so you end up with 3-4 times RDA for some amino acids but only a small amount of others. This led to a lot of vegans in the '60s suffering from amino acid deficiencies, which has led to a belief that it's hard for vegetarians to get enough protein.

This is part of a nutritional myth that was widely believed in the 60's. It is true that you need to get 8 essential amino acids (not 9), but in the 60's people believed you had to get 8 amino acids in every meal, so "protein complementarity" was a big deal with vegetarians in the West (not so much in ancient vegetarian cultures). What we now know is that while it's true you need to get your protein from different sources to get the amino acid coverage (other than some complete plant-based proteins like so

I actually know a few long term vegans and they take great care to eat sufficient proteins. "how do you get enough protein" sounds like a stupid question, until you talk to people that not do this as a fad but for the rest of their life. It is a real issue they need to consider. They start to eat things, like tofu, that you would not consider part of a normal diet. Becoming a vegan does not mean removing meat, eggs and cheese from your diet, it also means finding substitutes. Vegetarians on the other hand,

It's fairly easy to say that, but it gets a bit more complicated when you look at it closely. Your argument follow the logic "if people don't want to be drug addicts, they just need to say no to them". Hey, I remember even that there has been a campaign for that!

And? How well did that work out for your country? You don't have any drug addicts anymore now that you've explained to your people that drugs are bad for them, right?

Of course, we're looking at a different underlying problem here but simply saying "

Your argument follow the logic "if people don't want to be drug addicts, they just need to say no to them". Hey, I remember even that there has been a campaign for that!

Yes, and that campaign was actually quite successful. It was not an overnight panacea, but drug use among teenagers dropped rather significantly over the course of that campaign. This despite the fact that it was routinely reviled in the press and by educators.

Yup. The easiest way to lose weight is with an unbalanced diet and the best unbalanced diet, is the high protein diet of Dr Atkins / Paleolithic. The worst way to lose weight, is with a balanced diet, since then you have to eat almost nothing and you'll feel terribly hungry all the time.

All diets work exactly the same way - cut the calories you eat until you consume less than you use in your daily exertions.

All the pseudo scientific bullshit that fad diets come out with on top of this is just that - bullshit. Paleo pretends that it's a diet that our paleolithic ancestors followed (it isn't), that our bodies aren't accustomed to eating certain food items like grains (they are), and that if we live like cavemen we'll lose weight. What it boils down to is that it simply bans high carb foods

Same here. Tried it and found it works really well. Closer to hunter gatherer ancestors 300,000 years ago who ran down a large animal and then ate practically the whole thing, supplemented with berries and tubers or whatever. Lots of meat, lots and lots of fat, very little carbs.

Actually, it was the right balance of carbs, as was found before agriculture, and later, the vast industrialised agribusiness, made carbs so cheap you could fill half the plate with them, and then a long advertising campaign convinc

Tubers like potatos, yams etc. are banned by the paleo diet. And rice, grains and even pseudograins. It doesn't so much replicate a paleolithic diet so much as arbitrarily ban high calorie foods and concoct a backstory to justify that.

You do want the fat. Studies have found that people who eat fat, are not fat, while the people who don't eat fat are fat. They also looked at young children as they first started drinking milk. The children that drank non-fat milk got fat even when they weren't fat to start with, and the children that drank full-fat milk did not.